My intentions this week were to model an complex three dimensional geometry and model it with planes. These planes, I could fabricate on a laser and/or a vinyl cutter.

1.Design Sketches

After thinking of some modular systems and planar transformations that could produce interesting 3d forms I arrived at the dodecahedron.

2.Testing in 3d environment (Maya)

During previous degree at the TU Delft, I predominantly worked with Maya, which seems to an an anomalous choice in respect to other international architecture schools. Nonetheless, I am comfortable working in it, and the renderings look great.

I first tried to build the dodecahedron through the assembly of pentagons and some simple calculations, when I googled it and found out that the dodecahedron is a standard polygon in the software. Wasted an hour....:(

Then I drew the lines. Projected them unrolled them on a plane and opened them in acad.

3. EXPORTING TO VINYL CUTTER

I first tried to get the vector file to print on the vinyl cutter, but this was hell. I tried several formats, and although the software that comes with the vinyl cutter says it takes .ai filed, it does NOT. Eventually I used the drivers in the command line and printed a first test.

4.PRINTING AND MATERIALS

After advice from our TA James (who has been extremely helpful) , I bought some plastic binders from the supermarket which seem to be made out of the same material they sell in the hobby shop - only a lot cheaper. Although the material only has a thickness of about 0.2 mm it took 4 times to cut it to a degree that i could peel it out.

5.DESIGN ERRORS

The design had some faults. I mirrored the tabs to find where I should put the slits, but didn’t draw them symmetrically. When I put them together, the truncated pentagonal pyramid that was supposed to appear was distorted. In this way it will not aggregate well into a final dodecahedron.

6. ANOTHER TRY

A new design which includes an ying-yang formed incision to mount the surfaces to each other and a redesign of the tabs (widened the slots and made a cutline along the teeth).

I vinyl cut them again and the machine cut the holes in the most illogical sequence imaginable. Every cut took 20 minutes, meaning an hour and twenty minutes for four truncated pentagonal pyramids. After four cuts it still didn’t cut through and i had to peel them out with a knife: rapid prototyping? Not really. Nonetheless, the design works it will just take a little longer to finish enough pieces to make a dodecahedron.

7.LEARNING RHINO

Last I played around in Rhine and made this render. I have to say that Rhino is quite a nice and comprehensive 3D model program. I think I’ll keep using it together with maya.

Bottom pedestal will be made with laser-cutter from plexiglass with joints that click it together.

I couldn’t find a v-ray renderer for Rhine on the Mac (which I used), so I used several spotlight. The result is OK.

Render of what the final light should look like. Render is weird because of many overlap ing surfaces.